Mark Lenz: Thankful secession fans are few

Sunday

Nov 25, 2012 at 9:00 AM

By Mark LenzDaily Telegram Editor

If you think of America as a Thanksgiving family gathering, it’s easier to understand the few thousand Americans calling for states to secede from the U.S. Usually, it’s the same relatives who seem to start arguments and always have a fistful of sour grapes.

No, there was no “lame duck” on this year’s menu. Get over it.

Because seeking to have your state break off from the U.S. is just as silly as the voters who said before 2004 and 2008 that they’d move to Canada if their candidate lost.

Clearly some people have forgotten that the Civil War followed America’s only other state secessions 151 years ago. Here are a couple of reminders:

— Go see 2012’s excellent film about Abraham Lincoln. (It’s the one titled “Lincoln,” not “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”)

— Attend Thursday’s 7 p.m. presentation at the Lenawee County Historical Society Museum. Author David Ingall of Temperance will speak on Michigan sites significant to the Civil War, and the stories behind them.

— Or, heed the voices of Lincoln and men and women of Lenawee County who sacrificed for what we enjoyed this week.

It was Lincoln who revived the national Thanksgiving holiday, urging Americans “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

“And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.”

(It was also Lincoln who began the tradition of pardoning a turkey, beginning with one adopted as a pet by his youngest son, Tad.)

Families in Adrian and other Lenawee County communities spent Thanksgiving 150 years ago constantly awaiting word from the front. Union armies suffered several demoralizing defeats in 1862 including at Richmond, Ky., and the Second Battle of Bull Run. Victory at Antietam two months before Thanksgiving had cost nearly 23,000 casualties — the single bloodiest one-day battle on U.S. soil. Lenawee participants included Adrian officers Lorin L. Comstock, John S. Vreeland and Richard A. Watts of Company A of the 17th Michigan Infantry, which lost 18 killed and 87 wounded at Antietam.

Three weeks after Thanksgiving, the Union would lose at Fredericksburg. That battle’s 12,000 Union casualties included mortally wounded Capt. Theodore S. Mahan, the son of Adrian College’s first president, Asa Mahan.

As war raged and sons and husbands died, did Americans feel like giving thanks? Probably not. Lincoln certainly understood that.

But it’s an incredible paradox that, the more we choose to give thanks, the more reasons we discover to be thankful.

Thanksgiving is over but plenty of turkeys remain. Here’s wishing all of us the courage to give thanks every day, and the blessings that flow from a grateful heart.

Mark Lenz, editor of The Daily Telegram, can be contacted at 265-5111, ext. 230, or via email at mlenz@lenconnect.com.